Monthly Archives: March 2015

My sister’s birthday is in April. When we were little, our mother used to make her a bunny cake for her birthday parties. Being two and a half years younger, I was always on the sidelines at those parties, but I wasn’t alone. I had what my mother used to call “the green-eyed monster” for company. Oh, how I coveted those bunny cakes.

I have vivid memories of those carefully crafted delicacies, with their little pink ears and their jelly bean noses and eyes, the way they perched, Sphinx-like, on a nest of green cellophane. I don’t remember if it was a carrot cake (doubtful, but oh, the irony) or some other kid favorite, but it pretty much looked like this one from Betty Crocker:

Adorable, isn’t it? Full of the joyous promise of spring and surrounded by brightly-colored sugary jelly beans. A child’s dream, with lots of frosting. An added touch of the exotic with the coconut.

As the phrase goes, “there is no there there.” And as every Oaklander knows, Gertrude Stein’s famous reference to the loss of her childhood home and the discovery that the city of Oakland had changed dramatically during the years she lived abroad (and more about that here in an excellent piece by Matt Werner), is… Continue Reading